I couldn't resist installing Boot Camp Beta 1.1 and running Windows XP Pro to see how the Mac Pro would fare. Signs are good so far, with just one glitch that proves Boot Camp is still beta software. Running the Mac Pro with Windows XP was simple, since the wizard-based setup is so easy to follow. Since Apple sent us four SATA drives, I used one as a dedicated 500GB Windows XP volume. Running 3D benchmark tests in Windows was a breeze, and the Mac Pro proved itself a worthy competitor. With its Quadro FX 4500 graphics card (which is more of a professional workstation card than a gamers' card), the Mac Pro played both Doom 3 and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory well at lower resolution (1,024-by-768). It also did all right at the medium graphics levels (such as High Quality for Doom 3 and 1,600-by-1,200 for Splinter Cell). At the most strenuous levels, 1,600-by-1,200 Ultra quality on Doom 3 and 2,560-by-1,600 for Splinter Cell, the Mac Pro started to stutter, understandable in a single-graphics-card system.

The one glitch that reared its ugly head during testing was a slow-performance bug in the hard drive subsystem: When running Windows XP under Boot Camp, disk access and transfer is pretty slow, and tasks that take seconds on a regular PC or Mac (such as copying a file) can take minutes. The drive glitch happens in Boot Camp on the Mac Pro, but not on iMacs and Mac minis. This contributed to the Mac Pro's good but disappointing score on SYSmark 2004 SE. After seeing its other test results, I expected the Mac Pro to score at least 200 points higher. Apple has acknowledged this disk-performance bug, and the problem should be fixed in time for Boot Camp's integration into Mac OS 10.5 next year. If you're not interested in Boot Camp, fear not: Disk access while running Mac OS X 10.4 is as snappy as you'd expect.

The Mac Pro is a capable video transcoder in Windows XP under Boot Camp: Its Windows Media Encoder score of 4:42 using our standard video test file falls just behind our class leaders, the Falcon NW Mach V (Core 2 Extreme) (4:08) and the Gateway FX510XT (4:22). Keep in mind, however, that the Mac Pro completed this task with one hard drive, while both the Falcon and Gateway used faster dual-drive RAID 0 arrays. The Mac Pro powered through our Photoshop CS2 test in Windows XP in an astounding 26 seconds, our fastest time yet. The current standard for Photoshop CS2 is around 5 minutes for a budget machine (such as the eMachines T3120, which took 4:59), two minutes for a fast mainstream machine (the HP Slimline s7500y, 2:25), and under a minute for the fastest desktops (the Falcon NW Mach V (Core 2 Extreme), 0:29). The Mac Pro is a powerful graphics machine, even in Windows XP. (Because of a lack of comparison numbers, I wasn't able to run the QuickTime encoder test on the Mac Pro using Mac OS X. Thus, the results above are not representative of the system's video-encoding capability under Mac OS X. We hope to be able to run comparison tests to gauge those capabilities in the near future.)

If you're a professional user who needs to switch projects back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows XP, you might still want to use two different workstations (as opposed to the business user, who should be fine with a MacBook or iMac). But if you're buying professional Macs for a Mac OS X-only business, grab your buying manager, sprint to store.apple.com, and start upgrading your power users to the Intel-powered Mac Pro. It's that good.

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Joel Santo Domingo is the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs. He joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way Joel earned a BA in English Literature and an MBA in Information Technology...
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